YCL-LJC CEC, 5 February 2021
On January 1st of this year the President of Turkey made an unprecedented intervention into Boğaziçi University. He blatantly violated the democratic rights of students and workers by installing a militant from his far-right Justice and Development Party (AKP) as head of the University in lieu of the scheduled elections. The provocative move was met with organized demonstrations of protest from students. The state security forces moved quickly, locking down the campus; sending in waves of armoured riot police to assault students and workers; infiltrating plain clothes agent provocateurs inside the locked down campus; and raiding the homes of students in the middle of the night to take them to jail, labelling the students as ‘terrorists’ as the police detain more and more each day.
We strongly condemn the actions of police who have been targeting LGBT youth during the crackdown and mass arrests of hundreds at Boğaziçi University and across Turkey. The Interior Minister has publicly referred to detained LGBT students as ‘deviants’ who ‘should not be tolerated’. This hateful targeted persecution is nothing new from the AKP. The President of Turkey praised the youth of AKP this week for ‘not being LGBT’. AKP has always used reactionary religious fundamentalism to divide the people, persecute religious and ethnic minorities, justify violence against women and LGBT persons, and attack secular insitutions.
Late last year, Turkish authorities detained Cihan Erdal, a Canadian permanent resident and PhD student at Carleton University. Erdal is concerned that his sexual orientation in addition to his support for the Kurdish minority could make him a target in prison.
The Governorship of İstanbul, which banned the protests of Boğaziçi University students on the grounds of the “pandemic”, did not prevent the demonstration of a reactionary Islamist group. This Islamist group targeted Boğaziçi students as the “enemies of Islam”. Police forces only watched this group from a distance.
This past year saw hundreds of thousands of people in streets across Turkey protesting the dramatic rise in femicides. Since AKP formed government, violence against women has increased by 1,400 percent. Just since 2012 the number of women murdered has more than doubled. The President has considered leaving the Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence since August, refering to the convention as ‘an attack on traditional families’.
The serious assault on students and workers is just another in a long line of attacks on the people of Turkey by the AKP. Violence against workers who go on strike or march to seek their rights has become routine. Violations of civil rights in Turkey are rapidly rising. There has been harsh suppression of trade unions in the private sector since the 2016 coup attempt. The coup attempt worked in favor of the ruling class as the government declared a state of emergency and exploited the given power to suppress the working class.
In a statement ‘Universities will not Surrender’, the Communist Youth of Turkey (TKG) put it firmly ‘neither the universities nor the country will surrender’!
We call on YCLers to campaign for the immediate release of all detainees!